This entire experience has soured me a bit on Lemmy. There were a flurry of excited posts about the massive drop that totally happened. Every article I read refrained from presenting any evidence, and all used waffling text that sounded like it was all coming from other sources that didn’t have any proof. It didn’t help that Zalenskyy seemed to explicitly say that there was a massive drop - and that sucks, because I tend to generally believe what Ukraine says. I know they’re in wartime and every government lies to some degree, but they generally seemed to be truthful for the most part.
So when I tried pointing this out in places, I got massive pushback - “No no, there’s totally been a massive drop!” Where? Where’s the drop? Where’s the numbers from someone doing actual measurements? No answers, just downvotes.
I see this time and time again - often where it’s probably less important, like people misread things and decide it means one thing when it doesn’t mean that thing - and usually, the thing is bad, so the fact that they completely misread it is probably not so bad, except that it means nobody is caring about the truth.
For example, the Vance couch thing bothers me. There’s plenty to string fascists up from trees for, but that couch thing was a joke in a book. So of all the legitimate things we can hate him for and joke about, that is a lie - a lie when it was taken as truth; originally a joke that became a lie when it was taken as truth.
We really don’t need to come up with bullshit to be angry. All it does is makes us susceptible to more lies. How much of what I believe is a lie? How much is just flatly incorrect because people keep repeating it as true and I’ve also fallen for it? I’m not immune.
It’s a serious problem everywhere, but Lemmy is small enough and generally progressive enough that it stands out because I EXPECT that fascists to lie. I would expect better from us. (And we aren’t as bad, but the amount of misinformation that is vibe-upvoted is insane)
edit: The only thing that makes me happy is that this article is getting upvotes, so there is some hope, at least.
tl;dr the “bots” were web crawlers, not social media accounts. And there’s no evidence that disinformation campaigns saw any change at all.
And notably, most of the actual news articles, even from the start, admitted that there wasn’t any proof if you actually read the articles. They were all “People are saying there’s a drop!” but farther down it was all “There’s no evidence it’s happening, but people are saying!!!”
I don’t know. I work at a cyber security company and the traffic to our site dropped by 58% overnight.
Is this the year 2000, we still measuring website traffic?
It’s my job to do so
Yeah, and how exactly do you know that was social media troll bots and not like AI training spiders? Do you handle cybersecurity for twitter?
No, I manage the website for a cyber security company.
So when the Ukraine war first started, the executive team asked us to block all traffic from Russia to our site. We logged a similar drop in traffic.
This time around, the traffic also dropped but it looked like it came mostly from the UK, DE, DL and SG. It basically went to zero.
We cross reference those IPs and they were all from a VPN.
So you don’t manage a site with any social media component? I don’t think the bots that were crawling your site are the same ones people are saying disappeared from sites like twitter.
It’s not very surprising that banning all Russian traffic resulted in most of that traffic moving to a VPN; that’s the primary method of circumventing geofencing.
Sorry that you are getting downvoted you are exactly right. People can’t handle being wrong.
This story, that Cloudflare reported lower identified automated bot and API traffic from the ASN of the destroyed data centres, has been so massively warped it’s insane.
It demonstrates that average people and apparently tech reporters like toms hardware don’t know how the internet works at all.
When residential proxies affect at least a third of US households, you don’t need to route through a data centre that will be flagged as bot traffic. You set up a wire guard config and route to a residential proxy installed on millions of smart TVs, android boxes, smart appliances, desktop computers, and phones.
Seriously, I recently mapped multiple residential proxy networks with over 30 million unique US ips that were just scraping. You can use math to reliably fingerprint these networks, they’re big, with hundreds of millions of IPs involved, and you can rotate them via an API call to clean ones.
Zero of this traffic would be taken down by these strikes. We didn’t even see any perceptible change in internet traffic overall with this.
tech reporters like toms hardware don’t know how the internet works at all.
I’m sure they just don’t care. The vast amount of modern “journalism” is just reposting someone else’s story. And if they get clicks, they don’t much particularly care if it’s accurate.
Modern journalism, LOL. I’ve been reading on implementing Forths recently, there’s plenty of texts that don’t make sense, because how the hell do you change basic dictionary if you don’t have a dictionary already? There might be an implementation that doesn’t explicitly list that basic dictionary in the order of used ones, but what was literally written was wrong.
Even on things supposedly interesting only for people looking for specifics there’s plenty of vague and wrong texts. You start trying to approach the task by following them literally, then realize that’s not possible. Again and again. Until you just accept that you’ll get there faster if you make things up and do what you want, then add things you’ve missed along the way.
I’ve blocked my cameras and TV from reaching the wider web.
Is there a tool I can use to monitor my home network for this sort of thing?
Wireshark will give you deep infomation about any network traffic.
A proxy only routes traffic while the cpu cycles are happening elsewhere, allegedly, the data center that went offline.
Your argument only makes sense if those proxies are more than just routing network packets but also hosting the actual code of those bots. Oh, and you’d also need to assume there’s no c&c, the bots should be autonomous. Else there’s the single point of failure. If there’s a c&c then they can all go offline with a strike.
Exactly. Those smart TVs can be used as proxy to get around IP bans, but they can’t run LLMs on their own to generate social media posts. They can’t coordinate DoS attacks, only play a part in them.
I was arguing this point during the initial wave of suppositions by people just repeating vibes.
I feel like this really shows a certain flavor of social media bullshit very clearly.
The second problem, however, was that the ultra-specific claims about less activity in certain areas—MAGA, pro-Kremlin bot accounts, and AfD—had absolutely no basis in fact.
“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation.
Emphasis added.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell.
first comments I saw in the article was people here saying. did we see a reduction? I think because it did not feel like it especially with the increase with the election coming soon.
